Despite what you might think, medicine in the middle ages wasn’t all silly superstition, pointless potions and fantastical folklore.
It’s true that medieval medics didn’t have things like vaccines or antibiotics, and it wasn’t clear to them what caused many kinds of
disease. But even so, they drew on ancient wisdom, hands-on experience and good old common sense to try to keep people healthy and alive.
Most leading medical minds of the time relied on the teachings of three long-dead ancient Greeks - Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen.
Between them, these guys had some cracking ideas, as well as some that were a little more …crack pot.
In terms of medieval medicine, their most influential theory was all about the importance of the four humours. These humours were bodily fluids - blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Yum!
Most people agreed that keeping your humours in balance was the key to good health. And the key to knowing your humours was to study your pee.
And they really studied it – they’d look at its colour and consistency, and give it a good long sniff to work out what was what.
Even today, we still use urine to diagnose people, but we don’t usually recommend blood letting, which was the most
common treatment of the middle ages. To rebalance your humours, medieval doctors would pop leeches onto your skin and let them suck your blood.
